The invention relates to information transmission, and more particularly, to methods and systems for dynamic information transmission.
Many emerging data-intensive applications, such as those for electronic auction, news distribution, proxy service, and Web surfing, involve numbers of servers and much larger numbers of clients. The traditional pull-based or client-server data dissemination model, however, often suffers from scalability problems and performance degradation, especially when information flow or bandwidth capacity is asymmetric. In contrast, a push-based data broadcast model is scaled up to client population. The central idea of data broadcasting is that the server periodically broadcasts data objects to many clients who monitor the broadcast channel and retrieve data objects without explicit requests.
Although substantial applications have adopted data broadcast methodologies, they are mainly based on traditional data management systems, where a data object is mapped to state and value in the database. In such environments, a data object is independent, persistent, and static against a simple query/transaction. A simple query or read transaction is processed successfully, when a client retrieves the respondent data object on the broadcast channel. Many modern applications in practice, however, spread dynamic data objects and answer complex queries for retrieving multiple data objects. In dynamic environments, data streams need to be processed online rather than stored and later retrieved to answer queries. Dynamic data objects may have relationships, e.g., an anchor relationship among web pages or referential integrity constraint for the relations in a relational database. Hence, data objects can be associated, dependent, and dynamically generated.